


turning point

by foxmagpie



Series: little gifts [11]
Category: Good Girls (TV)
Genre: F/M, Rio getting grilled about Beth, Rio's Mother, Rio's POV, Rio's Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-07-14
Packaged: 2020-06-28 00:08:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19800631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxmagpie/pseuds/foxmagpie
Summary: Rio's POV: Rio tries to get Beth to understand what parenting will be like after the divorce with little success. Rio goes to his mother's house for monthly family dinner, and for the first time in years, they learn that he's seeing someone. Elena gives Rio a pep talk.





	turning point

It takes Rio a minute to figure out why he’s woken up. First, he registers that the apartment is almost pitch black, so it must be the middle of the night still. His instinct is that he’s been woken up by Marcus, but he remembers it’s not his night. Then he realizes he’s sleeping all wrong. Instead of laying in his bed vertically—alone—he’s horizontal, legs hanging off the side, and there’s a mess of blonde hair to his left. Elizabeth’s here.

He leans up halfway and his legs ache like a bitch. He looks over to see that Elizabeth’s repositioned herself, drawn up her legs so that they’re tucked up almost to her chest, and her hands are clasped like a prayer under her cheek as a makeshift pillow. _Who the fuck sleeps like that?_ he thinks to himself, but he’s grinning. 

Rio stands and stretches, bones cracking, and he realizes that whatever noise or light has woken him has now shut off. He’s debating whether or not to wake up Elizabeth so she can get under the covers and sleep like a normal person when he hears a dull buzzing noise, steady and consistent. 

His own iPhone is black and quiet on his bedside table as usual, so he figures it must be Elizabeth’s phone. Considering he pegs the time to be somewhere between three and five a.m., he knows bad news is waiting on the other end of the line.

It only takes a light touch to rouse Elizabeth—not a surprise to him, since she’s a mother of four. He himself had been woken up by a noise that, even now, awake, he can barely detect—and he had immediately worried about his son. 

“Mama, your phone’s ringin’,” he says.

Scurrying out of the bed and into the kitchen to dig her phone out of her purse, Elizabeth’s hands fumble to press the button to answer. 

Rio stands at the dining table, trying to give her a little distance and privacy, but his eyebrows are knit together as he tries to listen to enough to discern whether everything’s okay. 

He can only hear Elizabeth’s half of the conversation: “Hello? Is everything alright?... What time is it?... Is she okay?... Oh. Uh. I’m at Ruby’s. I must have fallen asleep… No, of course… Yes, yes, I’m safe to drive… I’ll be right there... Yes. See you soon.”

When she hangs up, her face is tight. “Emma's sick.” She walks quickly past him into his closet again. “I have to get home.”

“That Dean?” Rio asks. 

Elizabeth take a beat and then says, “Yes... she's throwing up everywhere. It’s a mess.” Rio feels his muscles relax—it’s just a normal emergency, nothing drastic. “I need to be there.” 

Rio leans against the doorframe of his closet. Elizabeth’s shrouded in darkness, but he watches her strip his t-shirt off. He can just make out her naked form because her white skin almost seems to glow in the bit of moonlight that just barely toes its way into the small room. She reclasps her bra, spinning it around and sliding the straps on. 

“Dean can’t take care of it?” Rio asks. This dude really is pathetic. 

Elizabeth glances at him. “Emma needs me.” 

Rio’s shuffles his weight from one foot to the other. “You gettin’ divorced, yeah?”

“What?” Elizabeth asks, pulling her blouse over her head.

“When he moves out, your kids are only gonna be with one of you at a time, yeah?” 

“So what?” Elizabeth asks, avoiding his eyes as she pulls up her slacks. “Where are my socks?” 

“ _So_ ,” Rio says, stepping into the closet and crowding Elizabeth until she has to abandon searching for her socks and look up at him, “this is a part of bein’ separated. You think Marcus don’t cry for his mom when he’s sick? When there’s a thunderstorm? You think he don’t ask her for me when he has a nightmare? I’m not sayin’ it’s easy, but it’s all a part of it."

Elizabeth gently pushes her hands into Rio’s chest, trying to move him so she can keep looking for her socks in the dark. Rio stands firm, unbudging, but he reaches up to pull the string so that the single light bulb flicks on. 

“Elizabeth. Stop. It’s late. Unless you don’t trust that Dean can handle it, get back into bed.”

Elizabeth’s eyes narrow. “I’m not—it’s not that—I know he’s a good father. But she’s asking for _me_.”

“She is?” He pauses. “Or he is?”

“I—Rio. Stop. I need to be there.” Elizabeth finally finds her socks and begins pulling them on. 

Pursing his lips, Rio breaks and asks, “Why you tell him you at Ruby’s?”

“What?” she asks weakly.

Rio just stares at her, refusing to repeat the question. He knows she heard it.

“It’s not the time to have that fight,” she finally says, and he isn’t sure whether she’s talking about the two of them having _this_ fight about Dean, or whether she means it's not time for her and Dean to fight about her staying the night here.

“You said he's aight with this,” Rio says in a clipped voice.

Elizabeth starts searching for her boots, trying to retrace her steps to the moment she slipped them off. 

“I mean…” Elizabeth trails off, wandering around the kitchen island. She rubs her eyes. “The work part, yeah. Look. This isn’t the time to get into it—I’m just—just trying not to rock the boat. Dean’s not ready to know about—about _this_.” She gestures to the air between them. “He maybe suspects… but this isn’t about that.” 

Rio runs his tongue along his teeth, feeling their sharpness. He’s not jealous, exactly—Rio can’t remember the last time he felt insecure, and Dean is just about the last person to make him doubt himself, he’s such a goddamn joke—but Rio knows Dean’s smarter than he looks (not hard, ‘cause he looks dumb as fuck). He knows Dean’s a manipulator. Unlike Elizabeth, he don’t trust Dean to keep to his word. Rio suspects Dean’s real underlying motives just haven’t been sussed out yet, but what really annoys him is that Elizabeth keeps defending the guy, keeps believing in him at the same time that she’s making herself smaller, fearing that he’ll keep trying to take her kids, and that’s a threat that don’t have an expiration date—he can hang that over her head forever. 

Having finally found them next to the couch, Elizabeth zips her boots on and walks back over to Rio, whose arms are crossed as he uses just his eyes to stare down at her. Elizabeth reaches up and gently places her hands on either side of his head, pressing just slightly, trying to get him to tilt his chin towards her. 

“I’m not choosing Dean here,” she says. “I’m choosing Emma.”

Rio gives a curt nod.

“So kiss me goodbye,” she says. Rio glances just past her for a second, tongue clicking, but then he dips his head to press his lips to hers. “Will I see you before Canada?”

“Doubt it,” he says, and his tone is still a little cold. She gives him a sharp look, so he rolls his shoulders and tries to say a little more softly, “I got a busy week.”

“Okay,” she says, deciding to trust that it’s true. “Just… hammer out the details and let me know, okay?”

“You’ll be gone all weekend,” he says. “Whatchu gonna tell Dean?”

“Let me worry about that.” She reaches up to kiss him again, and then she’s gone.

Rio returns to his bed and reaches out for his phone. He sends an email to Gretchen, asking her to call him tomorrow when she can. Then he calls his boy Aviles, even though it’s not quite five a.m. yet.

“Aviles? Yeah. I got a few things I need you to do for me. One is setting up a tail for the next few weeks. I need to get a good sense of the schedule, where they go and when. The second thing I need is for you to find me someone who’s real good at engravin’ metal. Someone that can work fast. I’ll pay extra.” 

* * *

Judging by the cars in the driveway and along the street, it looks like almost everyone else has arrived by the time Rio pulls up to his childhood home. Twice a month, Rio’s mother hosts family dinner and the house fills with all his sisters, in-laws, and nieces and nephews. 

His oldest sister Miriam is on the front porch smoking, watching him as he walks up. 

“Already that tense, huh?” he asks, gesturing to the cigarette between her fingers. 

Miriam shrugs. “Ma just found out about Christmas—again.”

“It happens every other year,” Rio says. They’d worked out an alternating pattern, so this is the year that Miriam and her husband go down to visit his family in Texas and the year that both Rio and Vee’s exes have their kids for the holiday. Sonia’s the only one who doesn’t have to divide the holidays with her wife’s family, because they’re local and they just come over and join in the festivities. 

“Yeah, but you know how she likes to forget—” Rio joins her to say, “—and guilt.”

Rio and Miriam both laugh softly, and then Miriam takes another long drag. “How’s the caddy?”

“Good,” he says. Miriam is a mechanic, so this is one of their most common conversations as siblings that don’t have a lot in common. He puts his hands in his pocket and looks out towards his car. “But I’ll prolly bring it in after the New Year for basic maintenance. Oil change, belt check, whatever. That good for you?”

“Sure, yeah,” Miriam says. “Just pick a day. You’re the only one in this family that knows how to take care of a fucking car. You know Sonia just told me she’s driving with expired tags? She didn’t pass DEQ because, as she puts it, she ‘didn’t realize she’d need to replace the catalytic converter for that.’” 

Rio breathes out a laugh. Typical. “You gonna replace it for her?”

“No,” Miriam says. “Or at least not right now. Money’s tight for them.”

“You gonna offer a family discount though, right?” Rio says, nudging her. 

“Can’t,” Miriam says, stamping out her cigarette. “Money’s tight for us, too. Just had to let go of one of my guys at the shop. Fucking sucks, right before Christmas and everything.” 

Rio nods quietly. Even if he could offer Miriam money without her asking too many questions about where it came from, she wouldn’t take it. Her pride’s real touchy. As the oldest of them, she was the one that had to fight tooth and nail for everything she’s got, and she gave a lot of it away to them since she helped pay the bills after their father died. Miriam’s the one Rio gets along with least, but he respects how she keeps herself honest, so he keeps his dealings the most private from her. He’d been able to help Verónica and Sonia out with their educations in his early twenties, and he’d just fudged the details to Miriam and his mother. He knows right now that he’ll pay for Sonia’s car repairs, and they’ll make something up for Miriam to explain how she was able to get the money. 

“Where’s Marcus?” Miriam asks as she turns to start walking in the house with Rio.

“Elena’s bringing him by. Probably be here soon,” he says. “I think they were doing some shoppin’.”

Rio nods at Miriam’s husband, David, who sits on the couch watching football with his son Lucas as he walks deeper into the house. He has to answer the Marcus question at least two more times. His mother asks when he kisses her cheek in the kitchen, and his nephew Julián, Marcus’s little buddy, asks when Rio steps out into the backyard to say hello to the rest of the kids.

“Get your face outta your phone,” Rio says, swiping his hand in front of the screen his niece Gabi is staring at as she sits cross-legged on the porch. He sits on the step next to her. The other kids, younger than Gabi, not quite yet teens, run around on the grass playing soccer. 

“It’s fuckin’ boring here,” Gabi complains. “I don’t want to play with estos bebés and I don’t want to hang out with the boring-ass adults either. No offense.”

“Watch your goddamned mouth,” Rio says, and Gabi rolls her eyes and smiles. “How’s school? Ready for finals?”

“Sure,” she says sarcastically. 

“¿No estás estudiando?” He _tsks_ at her. “Get your head on straight, yeah? You a smart girl, you just gotta put your head down and focus. Plus. I hear your mom aint lettin’ you get your license til you get that GPA up.”

“God, Tío, you’re such a buzzkill. You’re as bad as Tía Sonia and _she’s_ a teacher. ‘Blah, blah, blah, estudie, estudie, estudie,’” she mocks. 

“Tell me I’m a buzzkill when you making G’s as a dope ass lawyer or doctor or whatever," he says, lightly punching her on the arm. "But you know first you gotta study and you gotta go to college.” 

“I thought you didn’t go to college, neither. Mom is always bitching about how, as she puts it, ‘your lazy ass is loaded.’”

Rio laughs. That sounds like Miriam. “I just got lucky. I did some stupid shit when I was your age—shit I would beat your ass for if I ever heard you were gettin’ into. I even went to juvie—”

“You did? What’d you do?” Gabi pockets her phone now, giving Rio her full attention.

“I’m sure your ma would love to tell you the stories, scare you straight. But Abuela’s even scarier than your ma—so once I made a li’l money I started working smart instead of working hard. Stocks and shit like that. Used that to make some equity investments in local businesses, and now I’m set.” This is the lie that Miriam and his mother believe, and it helps that it's partially true. Rio _does_ have investments in various businesses, restaurants, and bars around Detroit, he just also has the other stuff, the stuff that makes him the real money.

Gabi pretends to yawn. “That sounds boring as shit.”

“Boring’s better than the path I coulda been on,” Rio says. His fingers twitch at the lie. There's nothing boring about his life, and he likes it that way. ”That’s why you gotta go to school and get a cool job. Somethin’ you like that challenges you. So put your nose to the grindstone, chiquita, and stop messin’ around.” 

He ruffles her hair—she immediately starts smoothing it over in frustration—and he gets up to head back into the dining room through the sliding glass door. Rio sits down to join Verónica and Miriam at the dining table. 

“Dónde está Marcus?” Verónica asks. She eats a handful of nuts from the bowl on the lazy susan. “I don’t see him out there.”

“Elena’s dropping him off soon,” Rio’s mother says, walking into the room and swatting Verónica’s hand away from the bowl. “Don’t ruin your appetite. Los tamales are in the oven.”

“They aint ready _yet_ ,” Verónica refutes, reaching for more nuts.

“ _Aren’t_ ,” Sonia corrects as she walks in from the back hallway. “Hey, brother.”

“What, you a English teacher now?” Rio teases. “Thought you was a math teacher.”

“ _An_ ,” Sonia says, rubbing her eyes, but her lips are curved up. “ _Were._ Christ, who taught you to speak?”

“Dios la perdone,” their mother says, crossing herself and looking up. “Who would ever believe we raised you in the church with the mouths you lot have?” She waves her hand in the air as if she can’t be bothered with their nonsense and heads into the kitchen to check on the tamales. 

“I speak two languages,” Rio shoots back to Sonia. “And I don’t sound like a fuckin' nerd in neither of ‘em, so callaté.”

Verónica laughs, but Sonia's eyes narrow. 

“One and a half, _maybe_ ,” Sonia says, sitting down. “It doesn’t count if you don’t follow the rules.”

“Christopher? Follow rules? Please,” Miriam says. 

The front door opens and everyone turns their head to see Elena walking in with her hand on Marcus’s shoulder. He darts away with her to hug Rio, who kisses his son on the head and says, “What’s up, pop?”

“Mommy and I found you a Christmas present!”

“That right? Is it something good?”

“Yeah, you’re gonna like it! It’s—”

Elena reaches out to touch Marcus. “No! Remember when we talked about how surprises are more fun?”

Marcus smiles shyly and then says, “I can’t tell you.”

The adults laugh and Rio pokes Marcus in the stomach and tells him Julián is waiting for him outside. 

As soon as Marcus is out the door Elena says, “Look, I tried _so_ hard to steer him in the right direction, but man, our kid really has some bad, _bad_ taste.” She shudders. “How are your acting skills? Because you are gonna _hate_ what we got you.”

Rio’s face cracks into an amused smile while Sonia asks, “Bad taste? You _sure_ Marcus is Chris’s kid? ‘Cause I think, like, at least 50% of Chris’s personalidad is his belief that he has the best test in everything.”

Rio shrugs with a smirk, then pretends to wipe something off his shoulders. “That’s ‘cause I do.” 

Everyone laughs when their mother comes back into the room. “Elena! You’re here!”

“Consuelo, it’s so good to see you!” The two women hug. 

“Why don’t you ever come over anymore, huh? You haven’t come by for family dinner in almost two months,” Consuelo asks, disappointment etched on her face.

“I’m sorry, tía. You know how life gets. I’ve been busy,” Elena says vaguely. 

Rio doesn’t look up at either of them: he has suspected for a while now that Elena is seeing someone and that it’s probably on the verge of becoming serious. She has a habit of dipping out on acting like part of the family whenever that happens, but he doesn’t ask—he knows that Elena will introduce him to anyone she’s seeing before she introduces him to Marcus. 

“Hmph,” Consuelo says. “La familia es lo más importante.”

Elena’s eyes crinkle at the edges. “Yo sé, yo sé, pero I’m here now, right?”

“Supongo,” Consuelo says. _I guess_. Elena and Rio exchange an amused glance—Elena knows just as well as Rio does that his mother loves to guilt them at any opportunity possible. “You’re staying to dinner, then?”

“Sure,” Elena says, and she sets down her purse. “I think I can do that.”

“Mom, come on,” Verónica says. “Don’t give her a hard time. We _all_ know she pulls a disappearing act whenever she’s boning someone new.” 

“Verónica!” Consuelo says, acting shocked. “Watch your tongue.” 

“You know she’s right, though,” Sonia says, and she elbows Elena conspiratorially. 

This ribbing goes back and forth for a minute until Consuelo is sighing loudly, disappointed, and starting in on one of her favorite tirades—the one that comes up every time Elena has a new boyfriend. “You know I just don’t understand why you two could never work things out—figure out your nonsense and get married.”

“Jesus, ma, not this again,” Rio says, but Elena just laughs and gives his shoulder a squeeze. 

Consuelo was always holding out hope that Rio and Elena might get back together, but the problem was they were never _together_ , not really. Elena wasn’t considered family just because she was Marcus’s mother—she’d practically grown up in the Contreras household. 

For a long period of his life, Rio had been inseparable from his best friend and next-door-neighbor Martín. Martín was the reason that Rio was _Rio_ , after all—the story’s murky and unclear anymore, only half-remembered, but someone had dubbed them _Rio y Mar_ , river and sea, sometime around the age of ten or eleven. Whatever the reason was, the name had stuck—Rio’s friends and teachers called him “Rio,” and his family did, too, until he asked them to stop when it all went to hell. He couldn’t rid himself of the name entirely, though—once he had already established himself on the streets, he had to stick with it. 

Long before all this, before everything imploded, Mar had started dating Elena. It was early high school, and the inseparable duo shifted easily into a trio. They all spent every day together roaming the neighborhood—Rio and Mar mostly getting in trouble sneaking around smoking weed and sharing 40s in the alleyway or the shed, Elena sometimes daring to take a hit or a sip—before they ended up in the Contreras kitchen eating Consuelo out of house and home nearly every night. 

Consuelo had loved to dote on Elena, not only because she felt Elena was a good influence on the boys, but because Elena had suffered the heartache and tragedy of having her parents deported sometime around their junior year. She couch-surfed and bummed around for a while, living with any family friend that would take her in, and when Miriam finally moved out, Elena took her spot in the girls’ bedroom. 

Elena and Mar had gotten married almost straight out of high school. While Rio was climbing the ranks on the seedier side of the tracks—trading nickel bags for dime bags and getting his neck tattooed to try and shed his pretty-boy appearance and look tough—Mar went straight and joined the army. Despite what happened later, Mar had wanted and tried to be a good man and a good husband, and he thought the military would allow him to do that. 

While Mar was stationed halfway across the world, Rio did his part to make sure Elena was safe and sound in his absence. Elena trusted Rio with everything, but she gave him hell and always threatened to tell his mother what he was up to. She tried encouraging Rio to follow Mar’s lead, to go legitimate, but Rio couldn’t be convinced, and she eventually gave up, accepting defeat—she just didn’t want to know the details. 

When Mar returned, he was angry, different from before. He struggled to keep a job and his face was always dark and serious. Rio had hooked him up with some work, and Mar took to it. He was good and comfortable pointing a gun in someone’s face, and he liked the power. Elena didn’t. She wanted the old Mar back, the one that had enlisted with the intention of growing into a better man. 

Rio started noticing Mar’s short fuse, the way he overreacted to a slight, the way he couldn’t keep his head in a situation or maintain that calm, detached control that Rio himself had mastered—the element that Rio felt was key to surviving in this world. 

The night everything fell apart, Rio came over for no particular reason, just to drop by and hang out. What he found was Elena crying in the kitchen, her face red and blotchy, purple bruises already blooming on her arms. Mar had already stalked off somewhere, out of the house, and Rio had held her and talked to her and, eventually, coaxed the truth out of her: this was not the first time. He believed her, but she still showed him the green and grey bruises on her legs, on her back, on her stomach as proof. 

Rio got Elena to safety. He set her up in an apartment and helped pay for lawyers, and they simultaneously severed the longest, most serious relationship of both of their lives. Neither of them knew where Mar went or what became of him once the divorce was finalized, but somehow the grief of losing him pulled them closer together—their pain mutating into something else, something dark and murky and strangely tender, something that led to the surprise of Marcus. 

They tried—they played house for the first few months of Marcus’s life, but they knew what everybody else could never seem to understand, then or even now: that just because they loved each other, they never loved each other the way they had both loved Martín. 

They went back to being friends, only now they had a son to raise together, too. 

“I just think Christopher could use your stability,” Consuelo says, not dropping the subject. “He’s _so_ wild.” She frowns at Rio’s neck tattoo. “He just needs a good woman to settle down and get serious with.”

“Yeah, Chris, you just need a good woman to get _serious_ with,” Elena says pointedly, smirking at him, and he knows she’s referencing their conversation in the hallway outside his apartment when she’d asked him about Elizabeth. Rio shakes his head, half-amused, half-annoyed. 

“What was that?” Sonia asks, pointing between the two of them, sniffing out some deeper meaning to Elena’s words. 

“Where’s Felicia?” Rio asks, turning around, looking around for Sonia’s wife, trying to change the subject.

“She’s at home with the baby—Camila’s running a small fever, but _don’t_ think you can weasel out of this. I saw that look!”

“Drop it,” Rio says, eyes flashing dark, but that only encourages Sonia. 

“Oh my god, you’re _seeing_ someone. You _are_ ,” she says, spotting him chew his cheek. “¿Es serio?”

“You know he won’t give up anything,” Miriam says. “He'd rather die than let us know anything about his life."

“Don’t be rude to your brother,” Consuelo scolds, and Miriam exhales through her nose. “Esté respetuosa.”

“ _He_ might not say anything,” Verónica says, pointing at Rio and then twisting to point to Elena. “But that doesn’t mean Elena won’t! _Does_ Chris have a girlfriend?” 

Elena laughs again, enjoying his torture as Consuelo asks, eyes bright and hopeful, “Christopher, tienes una novia?” 

“Christ,” Rio says, running his hand along his hair. His mother clucks disapprovingly at his language. “No. I don’t have a girlfriend. Leave it alone, aight?”

“What kind of woman must she be if she can get Chris to break a lifetime of never having a serious romantic attachment?” Miriam asks. “Besides you, I suppose, if you want to count that,” she adds, looking at Elena. 

“Come on, tell us all about her!” Sonia begs him, reaching for him across the table. “Oh man, I would love to meet her. If she can put up with your shit? She must be a saint.”

“Cállate,” Rio says, shaking his head. “There’s nothin’ to report.”

Sonia gives up on getting anything out of Rio and shifts her focus to Elena. “You _know_ something,” she insists. “Spill.”

Elena puts her hands up. “It’s not my business to tell.” 

“So there’s definitely _something_ ,” Verónica says, delighted. She even clasps her hands together. 

“You gonna make me play dirty, is that it?” Sonia asks, eyebrows shooting into her bangs. “Because you know I will. Where’s Marcus?”

“No—f’real?” Rio feels his heart pounding against his chest. He does _not_ want Marcus dragged into this. “Jesus. Fine. Yeah, there’s someone, I _guess_. No, you can’t meet her,” he says before they can even ask. 

“Surprise,” Miriam says in monotone. 

Consuelo beams. “Christopher, don’t be like that! Necesito conocerla.”

“Why can’t we meet her? Elena has, hasn’t she?” Sonia presses. 

“No,” Rio lies at the same time that Elena says, “But that was an accident.”

Rio rubs at his eyes. _Christ_ , _this is a disaster_. 

“How do you ‘accidentally’ meet someone?” asks Verónica. 

Elena glances at Rio, and he can see that she’s breaking now that the cat’s already halfway out of the bag. 

“I walked in on them in his apartment,” she says, smiling broadly. The excitement has gotten to her, and Rio can see that Elena thinks whole fiasco will push him towards making whatever he has with Elizabeth “serious.” 

Everyone seems to burst at once, all of them talking over each other. 

_“WHAT?”_ Sonia asks, incredulous. “Like _in_ on them, _in_ on them? Que escandaloso!”

“Ay Dios mío,” sighs Consuelo, appalled. 

Verónica’s voice is the loudest. “She was at his _place_? She must be special, then! He barely lets me over there!”

“You know doors have locks, right?” Miriam asks. 

The only thing Rio responds to is Miriam. “The door _was_ locked.” Nobody seems to hear him, though.

“I didn’t like, _see_ anything,” Elena explains. “It was just after. She was wearing his t-shirt.”

His sisters erupt into giggles and gossip and questions, and Rio wants to drive something into his skull. In all of his years of hookups, he’s managed to keep the women separate from his family, neither of them knowing much of anything about the other. Sonia had of course prodded, but she'd really never had any success. All of his sisters had assumed he was dating in some capacity, well aware that he wasn’t leading some chaste, celibate life, but he suspected his mother had really believed that there had been no one since Elena. In fact, it was likely she believed that she had scared him straight after he told her about Elena’s pregnancy when she’d given him a deeply uncomfortable and long-winded lecture about the sins of premarital sex. She preferred to live in ignorance, and Rio preferred it that way. Being constantly nagged at to “settle down” was better than _this_. 

“What’s she _like_?” Sonia asks curiously. 

“Blonde.”

“Es rubia?” Miriam asks, unable to hide her surprise. “Is she white?” 

“ _So_ white,” Elena says. “Blue eyes, pale skin, pearl necklace, the whole nine yards.”

“Huh,” Verónica says, squinting her eyes. “There’s an image: her wearing pearls around her neck while you sport the neck tat. People must stare at y’all when you’re out together.” 

She’s not wrong. Rio has definitely found some amusement in the confused looks they’ve gotten, and the way that it flusters Elizabeth—but he’s not about to admit that. 

“If I had to imagine a type for you, _that_ would not be it,” Miriam says, brows knitted. Verónica and Sonia look at each other and mime their brains exploding. 

“Tell us more!” 

“That’s really all I know,” Elena admits. “White, blonde—really curvy.”

“Oh my goodness!” Sonia says, slapping her hand to her forehead. “It’s la mujer from Chuck E. Cheese!”

Everyone whips around to stare at Sonia, and then she explains how Rio had just kept staring and staring at this woman while they were at the arcade, how she’d watched him talking to her and how she had teased him—and how he had _pretended_ she was just some mom from the soccer team. 

Rio sucks in a breath and stares at the ceiling. 

“I just thought you were gonna try and hook-up with her, but that was a _while_ ago!” Sonia shouts. “How long have you been together?”

Rio keeps refusing to answer any of the questions, but that doesn’t stop any of them from hurling more at him.

“Christopher, come on. What’s her name?” Verónica asks. 

“Nope,” he says, refusing to make eye contact with any of them. 

“Let’s guess,” Verónica says to Sonia. “Tiffany?”

“Stephanie?” 

“Heather!”

“Kate!”

This goes back and forth for a while, the sisters throwing out the whitest names they can think of while Rio pretends to ignore them.

Rio isn’t able to escape the nonsense until one of Verónica’s twins pops her head in the door and asks when dinner will be ready because she’s _starving_. Consuelo ends the whole thing by making everyone come get plates and dish up the tamales, but she keeps giving Rio little excited glances.

The kids take their food to eat in front of the TV while the adults remain in the dining room. David joins them and Verónica and Sonia catch him up while Miriam rolls her eyes, annoyed that Rio has dominated the news cycle during this family dinner _again_. 

Rio suspects that David could mostly care less, barely registering why the women are reacting with such fervor, but he does ask, in front of _everyone_ , “Well, here’s the real question: how’s the sex?”

Rio’s sisters and Elena burst into laughter; his mother acts as if she might faint from the disgrace of hearing sex mentioned at the dinner table.

The night becomes a literal nightmare for Rio: everyone is hyper-focused on his love life. They ask more questions about her—whether she has kids, whether she’s met Marcus, how old she is, what she does, how they met, on and on and on.

When the night is finally over, Elena walks out with Rio and Marcus to the car. They get Marcus buckled in and set up with his iPad, and then Elena apologizes.

“I know you want to kill me right now,” she says. “And I _am_ sorry. But you understand why they’re excited, right?”

Rio rubs his eyes, exhausted. 

“I know you don’t want to talk about her, and I know you said you didn’t really know if it was serious or even if you wanted it to be,” Elena starts. “But, Chris, admit it. This is kind of a big deal.”

Rio stares at her. “Elena…”

“I asked Marcus about her, you know.” 

“What?” Rio’s jaw clenches. 

Elena puts a hand on his arm. “Don’t get mad, okay? He told me he thinks you like her, that you smile all big when you get off the phone with her.”

Rio maintains an indifferent face, refusing to budge. He hadn’t realized that he was giving off clues like that, or that Marcus was even looking for them.

“Chris, I’m gonna get sappy now, okay?” 

Rio glances up at her.

“You’re my best friend. You’re the father of my kid. I love you to pieces.”

Rio’s lips twitch as he tries to suppress a smile. “You know how I feel about you, amorcita,” he says. 

“I do. And I think I’m right when I say that all you want is to see me happy.”

“Sí, claro.” 

“Well, that’s all I want for you, too.” 

Rio frowns. “Piensas que I’m not happy?”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Elena says, and she squeezes Rio’s forearm. “Pienso que… Okay. Your life is basically just work and Marcus—and I’m not knocking it—I know that’s a pretty damn good life. But it doesn’t have to be all of it.” Rio stares blankly at her. “I’m just saying—I’m just trying to say… even though I have almost nothing to go off of, I already know this is different, simply because I even know anything at all. I know you want to downplay it, I know you don’t want this attention, I know you’re basically dying right now because we’re even having this conversation—”

Rio laughs and Elena smiles brightly at him.

“I know that all _this_ —” she points back at his mother’s house “—is probably making you want to run in the other direction. But I just want you to imagine she’s not around anymore. To think about going back to what I imagine is a string of casual sex with different women. If that sounds good, if that sounds like it’ll make you happy, by all means, do it. But if it sounds horrible? If not having her in your life sounds just as scary as, say, having to introduce her to your sisters—well, then. I think you just have to suck it up and introduce her to your sisters.” 

Her lips curve up into a kind smile, and he looks at her, really looks at her. Besides his flesh and blood family, Elena is the person he has known and loved the longest. Looking at her now, he sees every version of her, from 15 to 35—the fearless Elena that jumped off bridges to plunge down into the watery depths below, the stoic Elena that refused to cry at graduation because her parents were stuck thousands of miles away in México, the hopeful Elena that waved goodbye to her husband at an army base. But he can also see the bruises buried deep under her skin, he can see the ways she carries herself differently now, the ways she’s careful and maybe even anxious in love—how long it takes her to trust someone enough to introduce him to Marcus. 

He thinks of himself, the ways he’s put his fingers roughly on the back of Elizabeth’s neck, the ways he’s pressed the cold metal of his gun to the soft flesh of her chin. He knows the exact way Elizabeth’s eyes look when she’s masking her fear of him with a steely resolve. And he’d been _intending_ to scare her. 

_That was before, before the lines were blurred_ , he thinks. Except when she stole his pills. 

_But that was just business,_ he rationalizes. Except when he sent her bits and pieces of that body. 

Does it matter that these moments feel like foreplay to both of them? That they both seem to like this game? 

Is he, or _can_ he be different than Martín? 

“Well?” Elena asks.

Rio glances in the car and sees that Marcus is still happily reading a book on the iPad, barely registering the length and seriousness of his parents' conversation.

“I dunno,” Rio says honestly. “I’m not sure that I’m that guy.”

“Which guy?”

Rio shrugs. “ _That_ guy. The one that brings her home to his family, that buys her li’l gifts just as a surprise, the one that clears a drawer out for her in his dresser. All that bullshit. Whatever.”

“Christopher,” Elena says softly. “If she wanted that guy, she’d be with that guy. So don’t be that guy. Be _this_ guy.” She presses a finger into his chest. “Just be whatever feels good to both of you.” 

* * *

Rio breaks into Elizabeth’s house the usual way: he jimmies the window of the dining room and crawls right in. Maybe he should mention this to her sometime—it’s not safe—but it also means giving up his own easy access point. He knows the house is empty; Dean’s at krav maga, Elizabeth’s at a PTA meeting. The house is dark as he makes his way into Elizabeth’s bedroom to place the small brown package on her bedside table—this time Dean won’t find it first.

Inside the package is a gun, a customized pistol. The handle is pearl white, the trigger a bright gold, and barrel of the gun he had engraved just for her: a delicate floral pattern, because he wasn't allowing her to wear her normal floral blouses to their meetings. She needs it for Canada, and they leave tomorrow after Emma’s Winter Craft Show. 

He walks back into the foyer, then through the kitchen, intending to exit through the mudroom, when the grocery list notepad on the fridge catches his eye. He rips off a page, digs through the junk drawer for a sharpie, and then scrawls a note to leave next to the gift: 

_Flowers for the boss bitch  
_ _Feliz Navidad_

**Author's Note:**

> [Here is the inspiration for the gun Rio gifts to Beth.](https://dygtyjqp7pi0m.cloudfront.net/i/7832/9387250_3.jpg?v=8CCABB796E7B610)


End file.
